National/World

Updated at 2:52 p.m. ET: Wal-Mart issued a statement Wednesday saying its request for partners to provide primary care services was "overwritten and incorrect." The firm is "not building a national, integrated low-cost primary health care platform," according to the statement by Dr. John Agwunobi, a senior vice president for health and wellness at the retailer.

Bingo! With all the television and bowl money it would get, Greece would be solvent again, and the Southeastern Conference would get that big Athens TV market.

You see, everybody talks about how colleges are all switching conferences, but essentially, they all just want to jump to the SEC or whatever best emulates the SEC. It's the Solid South of college football. Once, the South used to control Congress. Now, y'all: the gridiron.

Former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke came forward Tuesday to take responsibility for his role in leaking a memo used to cast aspersions on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who had blown the whistle to Congress about a botched gun-trafficking operation.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain stood his ground, repeating that the accusations of sexual harassment made against him while he was the head of the National Restaurant Association are "false, anonymous, incorrect accusations."

In a press conference in Arizona, Cain repeated twice, "I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period." The former Godfather's Pizza CEO added that the scandal and the media feeding frenzy were not going to push him to quit the GOP presidential race.

Former Penn State defensive coordinator Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky was found guilty of sexual abuse, convicted of 45 out of 48 counts on Friday, June 22. He was accused of sexually abusing 10 boys over a 15-year period in a scandal that has rocked the university's community. Several alleged victims have testified in the trial, which began on June 11.

Three years ago, the state of Virginia flipped. It had voted for George W. Bush in 2004, but in 2008, it went for Barack Obama, with the help of independent voters like Emily Perri. But as Perri cast her ballot in local elections in Fairfax on Tuesday morning, she wasn't so sure she would vote for the president again.

"I'm not entirely positive, you know, another four years will help improve things or not under Obama," Perri said.

Syria's brutal repression of an anti-government movement that began in March continues — even outside its borders. In neighboring Lebanon, the disappearance of an elderly government critic underscores the long reach of the Syrian regime.

Until recently, 89-year-old Shibli al-Aisamy spent most of his time in the United States. As a founder of the pan-Arab Ba'ath Party in the 1960s, Aisamy had once served as a vice president of Syria. He later broke with then-Syrian President Hafez Assad, the father of the current president, Bashar Assad.

After two years of record payouts, Wall Street bonuses will take a hit this year, a new report says. The report finds that on average Wall Street workers will get an end-of-year bonus check worth 20 to 30 percent less than last year.

Attorney General Eric Holder spent almost three hours on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, getting a grilling from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about a flawed gun-trafficking operation that let hundreds of guns flow across the Southwest border.

But even after the Justice Department oversight hearing, Republican lawmakers say there are lots of questions that remain unanswered.

"I can categorically say I have never acted inappropriately with anyone, period," Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain just told ABC News' Jonathan Karl on a live ABC/Yahoo webcast.

Responding to the latest accusation by a woman — Sharon Bialek of Chicago — who says he sexually harassed her in the late 1990s, Cain said the charge is "baseless, bogus and false" and that Bialek is lying.

"An appeals court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan just wrote an opinion affirming the constitutionality of the federal law overhauling health care," our colleague Scott Hensley writes over at the Shots blog.

New Orleans has become the center of an education revolution, where more than 70 percent of students attend a charter school.

The number of students taught in traditional district-run schools is shrinking fast. That's because parents in post-Hurricane Katrina can pick and choose from a smorgasbord of schools with different approaches and cultures.

By many measures, this educational marketplace has improved student achievement. But as this experiment moves ahead, it's led to questions about whether the district is truly open to the most challenging students.

As we reported at the end of October, 2005 YU55, an asteroid bigger than an aircraft carrier, is set to have a very close rendezvous with planet Earth. It'll be closer than the moon and today at 6:28 p.m. ET, it will make its closest approach.

Don't worry. NASA is confident it will miss us. Here's a video NASA put together that explains the trajectory and shows an animation:

Karen Kraushaar, a 55-year-old federal employee and registered Republican, has been identified as one of the two women who in the late 1990s settled claims of sexual harassment against 2012 GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, our colleague Liz Halloran reports on the It's All Politics blog and the NPR Newscast.

Until now, Karen Kraushaar has been known to many in Washington as "Woman A," one of two employees who settled claims of sexual harassment against Herman Cain more than a decade ago when he headed the National Restaurant Association.

On Tuesday, after another woman went public with her harassment accusation against Cain, Kraushaar's identity was revealed by an iPad news site, The Daily.

"This is going to be one of the worst storms on record over the Bering Sea," said Bob Fischer, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Alaska. "Essentially the entire west coast of Alaska is going to see blizzard and winter conditions — heavy snow, poor visibility, high winds."

Would President Obama swap Joe Biden for Hillary Clinton on his 2012 ticket? NPR's Political Junkie Ken Rudin is dubious. "Where this comes from I do not know," he declared in his Monday column dismissing the speculation about any plans to replace Biden.

Not all hospital patients are alike. Some are harder to satisfy. Especially those who are admitted to hospitals in and around New York City, Chicago and parts of Florida.

Patients in those places gave some of the lowest evaluations of their hospital stays, Medicare data show. The surveys asked patients how well their doctors and nurses communicated, whether their pain was always handled welland whether their rooms were clean and quiet.

The number of Americans who use food stamps is now close to 46 million, or 15 percent of the population. The government program that provides food stamps is formally known as SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And the number of people who depend on it to buy groceries has grown substantially, even since the recession was officially declared over, back in June of 2009.

Herman Cain definitely doesn't seem to have this crisis-management thing down yet.

He presumably went on Jimmy Kimmel Live Monday evening to fight the latest charge of sexual misbehavior, this one from Sharon Bialek that he made a vulgar and unwanted sexual come-on to her in 1997 when she was seeking his help for reemployment at the National Restaurant Association.

This probably isn't going to satisfy many of those who think ofThe X-Filesas a documentary series, but the Obama administration has now put the White House on record as saying the government doesn't have any evidence of life "out there."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard last week telling President Obama that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "a liar," according to reports from Reuters, The Associated Press and other news outlets.

Sarkozy also said of Netanyahu that "I can't stand him," the stories say.